Books Become Games
justinehsmith.substack.com
justinehsmith.substack.com
> I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: we see in the concept of games —here it comes again— a double mouvement, and indeed something approaching an autoantonymy. The concept in question can signify both a free play of the imaginative faculty, a Schillerian Spieltrieb; and it can signify a situation in which one is bound by formal constraints on one’s motions, and is therefore compelled to respond to one’s existence fundamentally through coming up with strategies. The gamification of our social life, which was honed and perfected on social media before it jumped the fence to affectivity, labor, and who knows what’s next, forces us to sacrifice free play to strategic play, and the leisurely flight of the imagination to narrow problem-solving.
> On the face of it, the gamification of reality looks like fun. But when everything becomes a game, it turns out, that game ends up dissolving into its merely apparent opposite: work. The dupes of the new ideology, underlain by the metaphor of the game, think they’re giving us life in an arcade —a child’s dream!— but what we’re really getting is life in a global warehouse, monitored and metricized, forced at every turn to devise strategies that maximize engagement with whatever it is we’re putting out there… all in the name of scraping by.
The information and concept density of this essay is higher, and reading this essay reminded me of reading a good book. I think the author advertised their book honestly in the sense that the essay likely reflects the reading experience of their book, but it's probably too honest if their goal was improving sales.
About the actual content: I resonated with the concerns of games becoming work, as it matches what I've heard from most of the YouTube creators I follow. YouTubers having to create strategies that maximize engagement makes video creation more work and less "game"/fun than it used to be. I agree that a lot of the web can be seen to be following this trend.
The only difference nowadays is how deadly serious everyone takes these metrics. It is absurd.
Remember how in the early days of WoW, people complained about how MMORPGs were more like work you paid to do? MMOs have organic social structures such as guilds where it's members are required to play at specific times in groups and do specific jobs to guarantee success at getting loot drops in an entirely artificial, centrally-planned economy. And then you had games like EVE Online or Entropia, which were entirely designed around being a second job you paid to play.
At some point, this was contained to games which were trying to provide a living world to play in. And the most approachable MMOs (again, like WoW) tried to keep the "second job" aspect optional. But then game developers realized that they could deliberately engineer their games this way, and then sell players cheat codes that cost real-world money to skip the grind and get to the supposedly good bits. So now every game tries to be a second job, so they can justify selling microtransactions to people who have a first job to ostensibly get to the "good bits" of the game.
If it was possible to generate interesting and meaningful quests and content I'm sure they would have.
"Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it."
I have read a little bit of Schiller, so I was somewhat aware of the "play drive" idea (Spieltrieb) but I really don't recall what it means anymore. All that to say that there are concepts that are not completely easy to understand here.
Schiller's concept of Spieltrieb is from his 1794 On the Aesthetic Education of Man, which describes a sort of idealistic, post-work state of man when given the liberty to merge his innate "Sinestrieb", the urge towards sensual and material gratification, and his "Formtrieb", the urge to establish moral order upon the world.
Schiller, alongside of Goethe and other Weimar Classicists, built on Kant's transcendental idealism to perform a sort of epistemological revalorization of the Greek concept of aesthetics, in contrast to previous enlightenment thinking which primarily focused on reason without regard for sentiment. Writing against the backdrop of the French Revolution, which Schiller felt had been co-opted by violent radicals and ultimately failed to achieve its lofty ideological goals, Schiller (being a playwright and novelist himself) believed that an appreciation for the arts could help develop the moral character necessary for a society to act as unified harmonious beings.
This concept has persisted as the pursuit of the aesthetic condition, a sort of post-revolution endgame to aspire towards where everyone, upon reaching some threshhold of education and appreciation for art, becomes happy and aspires to play and create works of art all day long. This aspirational outcome is referenced by political theorists like Marcuse, Adorno and the rest of the Frankfurt school whose work criticized what they saw as the inevitable unpleasant consequences of modernity and capitalism, e.g. commodification, the alienation of labor, and the devaluation of man.
Stanford encyclopedia on Schiller: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schiller/
It’s entertaining but what does it even say? Books need commitment and mental labor and most people on a podcast tour or radio tour never even read the book, just the talking points? Some people read deeply and well? Having a conversation on the same set of talking points can be valuable even if you wrote an entire book on the same topic as the talking points? That’s probably the meat of the thing.
The riffs on books and video games and social media are less well developed. He’s trying to fit a book into an essay and it won’t go. The compression leaves you with a copy of the idea in the book so blurry you can’t see anything but the shape of what he’s trying to say.
And then there’s an annoying postscript that can be safely skipped. I wish he’d told us who the teenage Korean podcaster was. He sounds interesting.
And if most people never read the books they buy, then the interviewer is doing a service by letting them know what signal they’re sending by buying the book.
You all act like you're being forced to use social media, or use it in a particular way, you're not. You act like its some sinister outside force that makes you obsessed with status, it isn't. It's just you. It's fun and oh-so-fashionable to blame corporations and Mark Zuckerburg for your emptiness, but it comes at a terrible cost to your ability to grow and change and understand the world around you.
(Please note how I said new, unestablished. People who already have platforms and influence before obviously don’t need what social media offers.)
A book author is absolutely expected to have social media and it can be quite critical towards whether they succeed or not. In fact for any kind of artist is.
Even as a software engineer, yeah you can do without it currently because of how good the job market is but playing the social media game right can offer a huge career boost (or malus if you are not careful). So not engaging with social media or not engaging strategically leaves you at a clear disadvantage.
Humans have a strong desire to be accepted by the group because that is critical for survival. And these days, being good at social media, having many followers, is a huge survival advantage. It directly translates into opportunities to make money, towards job offers, towards networking ability, towards finding a new apartment, being able to do a GoFundMe if you have been ruined by medical bills and so on.
So no, people are no doing it to themselves. They have to play the game.
I do not believe that something offering a potential upside means you are forced to use it - eating less carbs offers many potential upsides but that doesn't mean that people do it.
An alternative solution to the game would of course be but that we, as a profession, collectively decide (at least a big enough subset of us) to not use social media for career gain and socially punish those of us that do. You as an individual can fight for that solution but whether it happens or even is realistic is not in your circle of power.
Again, I am arguing under the assumption that people want the best possible outcome for themselves and are forced to act based on that. If you want to argue against it based you on a different philosophical worldview (I guess what most of the world calls liberal or as they call it the US "libertarian"), yeah we can have a ideological argument. Just make it explicit whatever definition you use and how you think it helps understanding the matter.
As for carbs, I don't think that is a very good counter-example. Eating less carbs carries some significant social cost (being seen as a picky eater, reduced option when eating socially). Not to mention it simply costs more energy to eat consciously less carbs. Sure it might be worth it for some people but the benefits are not that clear and most people are ignorant of proper nutrition to begin with.
Well, if you are arguing under the assumption that your argument is correct then I guess I can't argue with you.
To quote a meme, "We live in a society". This is at once an ironic shitpost and one of the most tragic facts about the human condition.
This seems to be a problem on many Substack posts; it tends to attract ramblings. For all the talk about disintermediation, it turns out good editors are invaluable, and sorely missed.
You have no complained that his complaint is too long. His reply might be: that social media has transformed books into tokens. Their content worth nothing more than to provide an identity and tell what message can be explained in a single page. He is lamenting how while promoting his book he is getting interviewed by people who have only read the marketing sales points. How during consideration for a award the committee will only evaluate a synopsis.
Overall, a article worth the read. Yes it is long. Yes it is not concise. Yes it is not a great article to retweet to your followers and establish your credentials with crowd X.
Writing clearly should be a goal of every wannabe writer. Whats the point of long form writing if you dont even know what the whole point of the essay is 20% in?
Anyone can claim to be a writer. It does not take more than having a keyboard in front of you and lots of time.
> Sometimes the journey is as important as the destination, more.
You don't have to make the reader pain through your long and fastidious journey.
> Not all writing needs to follow an introduction, body, conclusion format, with topic sentences.
Indeed, but still writing is supposed to be more than just fluff that says nothing paragraph after paragraph. That's just filler content.
Writing also _can_ be more than just fluff, but it doesn't need to be. It may not be your style, but long form, not-concise content has it's place. See: The New Yorker, etc.
I don't disagree with the feedback that it's rambling; for some, that destroys the value, while for others that's the point.
It's also an interesting representation of a topic he touches on; that social media has turned everything in to bite-sized nuggets of insight with no meat around them, that nobody – not even literary reviewers – have the patience to sit down and fully digest anything longer than a simple blog post length summary.
Given that his book is plugged in the first line, I figure this article is intended simply to advertise more copies of his book. While it does have interesting nuggets of knowledge, such as the initially unimpressive teenager having the most engaging questions, it is competing with many more compelling reads.
It's not about finishing at 20%, it's having an actual clue what the whole thing is approximately going to be about after 1000 words. If you can't even achieve that, this is just bad, random word salad disguising as an essay.
A commentator upstream declared that there is only one purpose to writing: to impart information. I disagree strongly. That may be what that commentator expects from writing, but I'm in it for many possible things.
I like writing that tickles my fancy, or entertains. I like writing that teaches me something, even if it seems tangential to the purpose of the essay or book. I like writing that doesn't even try to teach me anything. I write a lot just to get my own thoughts clear---in my own head, not someone else's.
Not everything is for everyone, all of the time.
That's OK. You can just walk away, even without registering your opinion.
I think Justin's erudite and learned style provokes those who feel he thinks he's better than the reader. I've been reading him for a long time and nothing could be further from the truth. He just likes to write about things and sees connections where others would not.
Sometimes it takes a while to explain those connections.
I'm almost done with the book he wrote about. I quite like it and have learned a lot.
It doesn't matter to write long or short; it matters to write clearly.
The purpose of any art form is to promise a payoff and then deliver on that payoff.
If the artist doesn't deliver, they have failed. If they deliver so late that the public has left the building, they have failed. If they make no clear promise, they have failed even more.
> it is not a great article to retweet to your followers
I don't have any follower, and I don't "follow", anybody. I don't play that game at all. But I am used to great writing from great writers of the past, and this ain't it.
I disagree. Change “any” for “some” and I agree. The way you said it, it just seems like a gamification of art creation. There is very good, if long, essay on that.
There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy.
Incidentally, if his book resembles this essay, it's no wonder people prefer to read the marketing synopsis. He should maybe do some introspection instead of accusing the whole world of being... I'm not even sure what... childish?
People's time is precious. Don't waste it in vain.
There are some writers who would strongly benefit from an editor who could at least help pare down repeated points. I'm almost certain that Justin isn't one of them.
Even for others (Glenn Greenwald springs to mind), I wonder if something would be lost. I may prefer one formulation; someone else may be tickled by another. Diluting an essay down to one acceptable version might be an unacceptable loss.
I dunno. I'm just glad someone's thinking deep thoughts and simultaneously a gifted writer.
In the bounds of the voice of the essay (personal, slightly dishy, academic) this is not rambling, it’s coherent and fairly pointed - the way that it makes its point is through triangulation and narrative, instead of the more typical blogspam which makes its point through h2 tags, name dropping and emphatic retellings of how CAC was cut by 18% resulting in the author becoming rich.
At any rate, you might give it another read, and mull over his idea that HN and the rest of the social internet are an especially pernicious ‘game’ - I think it’s worth the time.
"When I release my next software product, I'm going to get a book promoter to promote it."
“Talk to your customers, sell to potential customers or improve your product. All else is distraction.”
Aka
“Make something people want.”
I find this observation shocking, because it forces me to confront the idea that the author didn't already have a concise explanation of the book in their head, even during the later stages of finishing and editing the book.
Am I unreasonable to feel that I'm probably not interested in reading a book created by someone who didn't have any overall perspective on what they were doing?
And people read for different reasons, too. You don’t read Wodehouse for the same reasons you’d read Tolstoy or a Missing Manual.
For fiction especially you’ll find that some is meticulously planned out and then “filled in” whereas others are more story idea + characters and see where they go.
I will say based on my own experience writing a book: ideas you can understand without writing a book either don't warrant a book or probably have a perfectly good book written about them already.
That's why I qualified with "even during the later stages". It seemed to me that OP implied that the book would be completely finalised for publication without the author having gained the required perspective on their ideas. And that would surely defeat the object, since their insight wouldn't make it into the book; otherwise, I agree with your point.
When I got out of art school I remember a couple of not particularly talented but nice hardworking artists had some wild early success that no one quite understood.
Then we found out later they had hired agents that generally worked with actors. I remember thinking that was genius. Then I remember thinking I was tired and poor.
Ironically, Justin’s argument gets lost in repetitive rhetoric. Not that repeating an idea for emphasis is bad per se — I personally lost interest at the 60% mark once I got the gist of it.
He’s right though. Books are often purchased like mementos to signal the ideals you’d like to be associated with. And to add to the irony, Justin may be inadvertently writing his book for the same reasons. It’s fun to be thought of as a published author, to escape the 9-5, and to do something passionate for a living.
Personally, I don’t have much of an attention span for long form, so I can sympathize with my own readers. I took it as feedback to rework my book into a ADHD friendly format.[1]
I want stories that have a true sense of time between pages, character dialogue that feels like more than text on a page, and exposition that has a verisimilitude rivaling a movie.
…But not everyone wants that. Some authors want to publish books the way they’ve always been written. I just wouldn’t be surprised if finding dedicated readers gets harder every year.
[1] (NSFW) https://hugbox.biz/story/is-that-me/the-girl-in-the-mirror/
Not an essay on how cool it is to have books, or how pretentious it is to have books.
I think what especially frustrates me about this article is that there are good portions. Justin makes some good points that would do well with another round of editing.
I'll disable to page transitions for now, especially since they're poorly supported on iOS anyway.
This zinger really stood out to me:
"The only appropriate use of social media, beyond simple announcements of personal milestones or professional engagements, is shitposting. It is a medium that deserves nothing earnest, and that can facilitate no real project of social betterment."
Unfortunately I think the shitposting is being digested and regurgitated by web3 cultists as the "real project".
Why would someone writing an article in English not include an English translation? I have zero idea what this sentence means.
In a way I feel like this is indicative of one of the points of the essay: the expectation that authors today need to dumb down and distill their work into cereal for the lowest common denominators in order to sell more copies.
Granted, there's a fine line between gesturing to your intellectual forebears and just being an obnoxious prat, but I don't think the author crossed that line for the worse. Time to brush up on your french?
In all cases it seems like the British have held on to those a bit longer than Americans.
In this instance, you ought to be able to pick it out by context, thanks to cognates and two famous works by two famous figures being included. "Méridien de sang" can only be McCarthy' Blood Meridian; "la Monadologie de Leibniz" can only be Leibniz' Monadology—the philosophy of monads being the thing he's second most famous for in the English world, after co-developing calculus and before noble genealogy. "un double movement" is almost identical to English. From there, your guess at the meaning, given the lead-in to it, will likely be correct.
You think this is bad, you should see what they do in math.
I think we run in different circles. Despite having three university degrees and owning thousands of books that I have read, I’ve never heard of either of these books and am just slightly aware of Leibniz, though that might be explained by my never having taken a class on calculus.
tLdr; I still don’t have a clue since I don’t possess enough requisite knowledge in the required domain space.
If it makes you feel any better, I may as well be badly afflicted by dyslexia when I try to read a mathematical statement with more than a couple simple terms.
[0] I'm digging way back so this might be a little off, but fundamentally it's a solution to the Problem of Evil[1]: Leibniz puts us each in a "windowless monad" of a universe—sort of individual pocket universes—such that all the people we interact with are actually automatons of a sort. In this way, a person can do evil (i.e. sin still exists), but not actually inflict it on anyone else, if that makes sense. Meanwhile, bad things happening to you in your personal monad aren't actually evil because... I dunno, it's been a while so I don't remember exactly, but I'm guessing it comes down to "God works in mysterious ways". Basically, he replaces true causality with a kind of divine harmonic dance of actually-not-affecting-one-another things and people that make up what we call "reality". Nb. his actual argument is far less dumb than I'm making it seem.
[1] The Problem of Evil can be summed up in the child's question: "if God's perfectly good, and created the universe, why does evil (apparently—that part will matter a ton for some people who try to address this) exist?" Lots and lots of theologians and philosophers over many centuries took a crack at the seemingly-simple question—and in fact, one of Leibniz' notions, that the world one experiences is "the best of all possible worlds", was famously parodied in Voltaire's Candide, which is another way someone with a humanities background might have become familiar with his philosophy.
Doesn't this depend on your definition of "created"? It seems this presupposes certain things like ex nihilo creation (matter out of nothing) and god being able to create people (i.e., people are not co-existent with god).
In Leibniz' case, his work on that problem just happens to be probably his second-most-famous work at all, and better-known than most such efforts, even into our era of atheistic modernism (in part because of the Voltaire connection I mentioned—I'm sure Candide is far more widely-read than anything Leibniz wrote)
In the case of social media, the author appears to be arguing that on the one hand it is not some "special place" that is distinct from other communication networks - many of which have existed before man himself did. e.g. you can see a natural continuum from plants communicating with each other via airborne rhizobacteria -> animals communicating with each other with sound -> people talking -> telegraph -> telephone -> email -> social media. So in some sense it's just a continuation of an existing trend of expanding the domain of communication.
On the other hand, it is not like previous methods of communication because it is subject to algorithmic amplification and perverse "attention economy" incentives. For example, the best way for Twitter or Facebook to make money is to show you things that piss you off. The best way to be popular on Instagram is to live a completely fake life. In fact, the author argues that the only way to properly engage with social media is by treating it as a game - e.g. shitposting. In that sense social media is very different from pre-existing means of communication.